Most of the time, it's not too difficult for a non-believer to counter whatever religious arguments theists throw at them. But there's one "argument" that usually trips us up. And that's the one that goes something like, "But I've had this experience, and I know it was God!"
How do you reply to this without being insulting? You can't just snort and say, "Yeah, right."
My typical response is something like this: "Well, okay. You've had an experience that seemed real. But surely you can admit that it was a purely subjective experience. And you can't expect anyone else to believe something just because you think you felt something."
Unfortunately, that doesn't work well, either. Because the other person is offended when I imply that what they felt could have been all in his or her mind.
But let's face it… it probably was.
A friend of mine summed it up quite well. We were discussing her mother's recent plunge into religion via the ministry of Benny Hinn. My friend said, "I know far too much about human psychology and the brain's amazing ability to alter its own perceptions according to our desires to trust another human's testimony."
The human mind is a very weird thing. We do alter our own perceptions due to subconscious desires. All of us do, whether we realize it or not. All of us at one time or another have been "corrected" by someone else, shown that things didn't happen exactly the way we remember them happening. We may remember, for example, being the epitome of politeness at a recent social function. In reality, though (as our acquaintances point out), we may have been a little on the snippy side in certain circumstances. We remember being polite because that's how we see ourselves. We don't want to think that we might have acted impolitely, and we're certain that if we had, it would've been deliberate, and we'd remember it.
Likewise, an experience interpreted in a certain fashion by a theist could very likely be their own subconscious desires playing with their memory. They apply a religious slant to the memory because they want it to have been a religious event.
That being said, I will now undoubtedly receive a large number of emails responding to this column, all saying, "You're wrong… I know it was real, and that's that."
